Known are circuit arrangements which comprise a printed circuit board, that is a laminate of insulative material and metal whereon metallic paths are formed, as by photolithographic and/or metalization techniques, to create electric interconnection lines, and a plurality of electronic devices and components having respective terminals soldered to the ends of the electric interconnection lines. The printed circuit board has terminals which can be coupled to an electric power supply and to external components and devices in order to have the circuit arrangement serve its designed electronic function.
Modular structures of this kind are used in several applications to both perform signal processing and control functions for electric or electromechanical devices. The latter applications require that such structures be designed to provide effective dissipation of the heat generated in operation by their active and passive electronic components.
The trend toward increased miniaturization of electronic systems dictates modular arrangements of ever more compact design. However, a limitation to compactness of design comes from the sizes of the devices and the components that go into the modular structure and of the heat sinks which must be coupled thereto to dissipate the heat generated by their operation. To circumvent this limitation, besides providing smaller size components, so-called multi-chip structures have been proposed wherein the active electronic components--i.e., basically integrated circuits and power transistors formed on different chip as of a semiconductor material--are assembled within a single package including a thin metal plate which combines the functions of a holder and a heat sink and can be connected to an external heat sink of a larger size, and a metallic conductor arrangement for connecting the chips together and to the outside which is formed from thin sheet metal as by blanking. A structure of this kind is described for instance in U.S. Pat. No. 4,924,296 assigned to this same Applicant.
Such a structure can only be used to advantage where the electric chip interconnections are not too crowded, because of such links being usually formed of thin wires soldered to special metalized pads on the chips which, of course, should not be allowed to contact one another. Thus, it does not lend itself for use with circuits involving a large number of interconnected devices and high power components.